Nuances temper a gusto for the garish

Subtlety has never been Lari Pittman’s strong suit.

For the last 25 years, his garish paintings have paraded around the world like peacocks drunk on a diabolical cocktail of steroids and speed. They shamelessly flaunt their appetite for ugly color combinations and overwrought compositions. These manic pictures, full of hard-edged cartoons and whiplash-inducing visual shifts, are about as soothing as a big gulp of turpentine.

At Regen Projects, the L.A. artist’s six new oils on canvas continue in this vein, turning up the volume on their operatic excessiveness by layering surreal symbols atop a cacophony of far-flung references to love and death, life and sex.

But something happened on the way to this circus sideshow. His pyrotechnic virtuosity is as glorious as before -- and even beefier. But it’s accompanied by a new sense of subtlety: an appreciation of nuance, a delicacy of touch and a peculiar sort of sophistication. Odd as it may seem, these refinements are easy on the eyes.

Make no mistake, Pittman’s nearly 6-by-9-foot paintings are no wallflowers. Aggressively decorative, they are as unsettling as ever, especially to eyes dilated by 20 years of chromophobic Conceptual art.

Each canvas is a hurricane of color, texture, line and space. Images of familiar objects -- desks, gardening tools and jewels -- draw you into the picture. An abundance of abstract ornamentation keeps your eyes moving. As the images careen across the surface, they cut each painting’s panoramic expansiveness into manageable chunks. This mimics the swords, battle-axes, pikes and knives that swing through Pittman’s images, slicing and dicing.

The longer you stare, the more hidden figures emerge: a windmill and its doppelganger, an ax-wielding totem pole, outlandish chess pieces. One disheveled marionette, with pink dreadlocks and flamboyant attire, appears to be the Tin Man’s foppish cousin.

What initially seems to be out-of-control visual overload settles into complex compositions clearly masterminded by a sophisticate at the top of his game. As accessible as they are refined, Pittman’s paintings raise the bar for art that aims to both entertain and inspire.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Dec. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Tongue-in-cheek Freudian chic

Psychoanalysis has played such a big role in 20th century art that it’s surprising it hasn’t become a genre unto itself. Lisa Lapinski’s second solo show at Richard Telles Fine Art takes care of this oversight. Titled “Analysandom (The Office of Doctor Vital Brazil),” her installation treats analysis as nothing but style -- a matter of decor for the office, gallery or home.

Lapinski’s mischievous exhibition is far more delightful than the heavy-handed art it makes fun of. For the most part, such officiously academic work presumes that a trip to the gallery should be a trip to the shrink’s office. It treats viewers like patients in need of deep therapy.

In contrast, Lapinski’s installation insists that self-knowledge is too slippery to be served up so straightforwardly. The imagination runs riot in her installation, which is an abstract, stylized office that does double duty as a stage set.

The desk, sculpted from dark gray cement and adorned with six faux rhinoceros horns, looks like something Fred Flintstone might have used. Two small sculptures, “Snoopy Mitosis I” and “Snoopy Mitosis II,” resemble the offspring of a sea horse and a deflated bowling pin. The largest sculpture, “Apollo,” appears to be a purebred puppy so obsessed with mythology that it has taken on characteristics of the Trojan horse and Icarus.

Lapinski’s renditions of a couch, tissue box, family photographs, tabletop sculptures and framed certificates are even more playful. Each marries dreams and reality in a way that generates a variety of interpretations. The palette is predominantly black, white and gray, leaving viewers free to provide their own local color.

At the front desk, visitors can pick up 12 stapled pages that “explain” Lapinski’s installation without giving anything away. Included is a brief history of Brazilian interior decoration, a glimpse of Frank Lloyd Wright’s relationship with his son, and a one-act play starring Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and his wife, Miss Black, who is also Dr. Brazil’s mistress.

Fact and fiction intermingle promiscuously in Lapinski’s deliciously perverse exhibition. Think of it as the high-design equivalent of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a place where art, science and pleasure mix.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Dec. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Anger drives political messages

For the past 30 years or so, Alexis Smith has dipped her toes into the pool of politics. With her new show at Margo Leavin Gallery, titled “Living Dangerously,” she dives into the deep end.

Smith abandons the one-of-a-kind frames she used to favor for understated ones carved from wood. That restraint is nowhere to be found inside the frames, however. The images are as blunt, ugly and unsubtle as anything she has made.

That’s no accident. Anger seethes just beneath the surfaces of these collages and some juxtapositions cause it to boil over.

Many depict American, Iraqi and Afghan soldiers at war and rest. Others show politicians posing as friends or exaggerating their body language to convey unspoken messages. Two depict robed men and women going about their innocent business.

Smith clipped many of these images from newspapers and magazines during the last three years; others came from illustrated Bible scenes and old travel advertisements. One is from a U.S. Postal Service ad that tells customers how to spot suspicious items in the mail. Most of the warnings describe Smith’s mix-and-match images to a T, or, for that matter, any art powerful enough to move you.

Only a few other pieces include text, but with similarly explosive results. In one, the dictionary definition of “philistine” sketches the word’s etymology while indicting all forms of close-minded intolerance. Patriotism and fundamentalism, especially when they’re wrapped around one another, are likewise targeted by Smith’s combative collages, which argue for laissez-faire cosmopolitanism. About half of her images are matted with fabrics from Africa, Mexico, England and the U.S., where gingham provides the only respite from a wide variety of camouflage patterns.

A touch of international sign language appears in “Glutton for Punishment,” where the single prong of a broken fork stands in as a disdainful hand gesture. For Smith, politics and art are less like oil and water than fire and gasoline. Her works fan the flames of anger toward leaders for whom brutality seems to be business as usual.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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So ordinary, but so unreal

The blink-and-you-missed-it impact of computer graphics merges with the old-fashioned romance of untrammeled landscapes in David Schnell’s pictures of empty roads, barren footpaths and abandoned racetracks, all of which run through pine forests, parks and pastures. As wistful as they are unsentimental, these seven paintings at Sandroni Rey Gallery glance back at the history of Northern European painting as they look forward to an uncertain future.

Weird things happen in Schnell’s bewitching images. Their subjects are the dime-a-dozen stuff of tourist brochures: blue skies, lush greenery and the open road. But their compositions are too mechanical to transport viewers very far into the illusions they present. Trees line up too neatly. Roads curve too perfectly.

Schnell applies acrylic, oil and tempera so that his images disintegrate when viewed closely. Up close, space shrinks. Objects that seem to have volume flatten dramatically. Gravity loses its pull, and man-made structures appear to levitate.

Fantasy enters the picture in the form of oversized objects whose geometry is familiar but whose function is unknowable.

It’s appropriate that Schnell, who was born in 1971 and resides in Leipzig, Germany, is having his U.S. solo debut in Los Angeles. His art reflects the growing influence of L.A. painting from the past decade, particularly Kevin Appel’s architectural abstractions, Adam Ross’ sci-fi futurism and Dimitri Kozyrev’s virtual highways. Paying equal homage to such somber German heavyweights as Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, Schnell shows himself to be a post-apocalyptic Arcadian. A sanguine painter in tune with his times, he’s worth watching.

Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Dec. 19. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.